Marah J. Hardt

TL;DR: This paper identified 15 bright spots and 35 dark spots among more than 2,500 reefs worldwide and developed a Bayesian hierarchical model to generate expectations of how standing stocks of reef fish biomass are related to 18 socioeconomic drivers and environmental conditions.

TL;DR: A global survey of reef fishes shows that the consequences of biodiversity loss are greater than previously anticipated as ecosystem functioning remained unsaturated with the addition of new species.

TL;DR: It is shown that biomass is more than twice as high in locations not accessible to fisheries relative to fisheries-accessible locations and that exposure to fishing alters the structure of the herbivore community by disproportionately reducing biomass of large-bodied functional groups, while increasing biomass and abundance of territorial algal-farming damselfishes.

TL;DR: Critical ecological trade-offs in meeting key conservation objectives are illustrated: reserves placed where there are moderate-to-high human impacts can provide substantial conservation gains for fish biomass, yet they are unlikely to support key ecosystem functions like higher-order predation, which is more prevalent in reserve locations with low human impacts.

TL;DR: A look at how best to maximize three key components of reef use and health: fish biomass, parrotfish grazing, and fish trait diversity found that when human pressure is low, all three traits can be maximized at high conservation levels, but as human use and pressure increase, it becomes increasingly difficult to promote biodiversity conservation.